The United Nations mission in Somalia celebrated a milestone this
week, by moving — to Somalia. For the last 18 years, the U.N. Political
Office in Somalia (UNPOS) has had to operate from Nairobi, Kenya, since
the Somali government, when it existed at all, controlled only a few
spots in Mogadishu, the capital city, and virtually nothing beyond that.

But in the summer of 2011, an African Union force finally pushed the
Islamic militants known as al-Shabab out of the capital, and since then
both people and money have poured in.

On May 2, the U.N. Security
Council voted to replace UNPOS with the U.N. Assistance Mission in
Somalia, and actually put it in Somalia. If you’ve held the top spot in
Foreign Policy’s Failed States Index five years running, that’s a real
achievement.

Somalia is still, of course, the failed state nonpareil,
with no functioning government or military and an insurgency still
capable of mounting audacious attacks in the heart of the capital. In
mid April, al-Shabab suicide bombers killed 35 people at the Supreme
Court complex, the highest death toll since they fled Mogadishu en
masse. Nevertheless, conditions are now present for Somalia — with an
immense amount of outside help — to begin healing itself. And this
raises two important questions: What went right, and can those factors
be applied to states in similarly dire straits?

A few weeks ago,
Augustine Mahiga, the very capable Tanzanian diplomat who has just
stepped down after three years as the head of UNPOS, returned to New
York, and I asked him just those questions. Mahiga, who is a good deal
more plain-spoken than your average U.N. official, said that the key
prerequisite was exhaustion: After 22 years of war, he said, “People
were looking for an opportunity to transcend the vicious cycle.” Of
course, this is a little like noting that even the worst fire eventually
consumes everything in its path and dies out. The implicit inference is
that outsiders can’t do much until years of bloody stalemate have
proved to combatants in a civil war that there is nothing to be gained
by more fighting — as Edward Luttwak argued in his notorious essay for
Foreign Affairs, Give War a Chance.

Syria, for example, may be at the very early stages of this process.

When Mahiga arrived in 2010, Somalia’s factions had been engaged in a
U.N.-sponsored “transitional process” since 2004. When I went to Addis
Ababa with Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, in 2005, I
watched a session of Somali clan leaders trying to find common ground to
form a government; it ultimately dissolved in chaos, as did subsequent
efforts. But fatigue slowly induced a willingness to share power, and
Mahiga and regional leaders initiated a process of negotiation which
included factions who had not been given a seat at the table in the
past, including leaders of provinces seeking autonomy and moderate
Islamic fighters who had taken on al-Shabab. The Transitional Federal
Institutions, as the process was called, ultimately agreed to choose a
parliament, which in turn elected a president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud,
in September 2012. This, in itself, represented a modest triumph over
fratricidal clan politics — though a report from the International
Crisis Group called it a “botched process” shaped by “short-term
political expediency.”